Episode 293

In this episode of the Unscripted podcast, host Sarah Nicastro welcomes Dot Mynahan, who currently serves as the Senior Director of Safety and Workforce for the National Elevator Industry and formerly spent more than 30 years with Otis Elevator, and John Carroll, CEO of the Service Council. This session was recorded live at IFS Unleashed after announcing the Future of Field Service Stand Out 50 Leadership Awards, for which Dot and John served as judges. Dot, John, and Sarah discuss why recognizing strong service leaders is so important.

Dot began her journey at Otis Elevator as a temporary service clerk. Over time, she progressed through various roles, including field management trainee, maintenance supervisor, branch manager, general manager, regional field operations manager, senior regional field operations manager, and Director of Field Operations for Latin America. Dot's passion lies in coaching and guiding fellow employees, enabling them to excel at Otis. She co-founded and co-led FORWARD, an innovative global Employee Resource Group aimed at recruiting, retaining, and mentoring women within Otis field operations.

John is a seasoned CEO with vast experience in the research industry, who specializes in services, customer experience, sales, business development, and customer satisfaction. As an entrepreneurial leader in marketing and business development, John has a proven track record of driving revenue growth, expanding market share, and increasing business value. In 2009, John founded the Service Council with a vision to create a platform for sharing and refining innovative strategies among service-centric businesses.

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Episode Highlights:

Dot - 00:00:00:

The cool thing about service revenue is it helps smooth out the cyclical nature of the peaks and valleys, right? So it can really kind of provide a steady income stream through good times and bad, right? Because you still need to keep everything running. So it provides a steady income stream. And then depending on your service contracts and how you structure them, it's also aftermarket opportunity, break-fix opportunity, right? So you can boost your revenue stream that way.

Sarah - 00:00:36:

Hello, welcome to the UNSCRIPTED Podcast, where you'll find discussions on what matters most in service, leadership, and business transformation. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro. Let's jump in. Welcome to the UNSCRIPTED Podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro. We are here today at IFS Unleashed, the Future of Field Service booth. We just took the time to announce the first ever Future of Field Service Standout 50 leaders. And I am here at the Future of Field Service booth with Dot Mynahan, who currently serves as the Senior Director for Safety and Workforce for the National Elevator Industry. And formerly spent more than 30 years with Otis Elevator, as well as John Carroll, CEO of Community Platform Service Council. We just finished announcing the standout 50, and we're going to talk a bit about the importance of recognizing service leadership. Okay, so Dot and John both served along with myself and Professor Tim Baines of The Advanced Services Group as judges for the standout 50. Tim couldn't be here with us at the event, but Dot and John were able to join me in handing out trophies and acknowledging the leaders on stage. So thank you both for your participation in this initiative and for being here at the event with us. We really appreciate that. If you both want to say hello, I don't know if there's anything you want to share about yourselves that doesn't fit into just your titles. I know you're both much more than your work titles, but say hello.

Dot - 00:02:10:

Hi, everyone. I think your intro was great. I think if anything, I have a passion for workforce development that I'm really excited to pursue in this new chapter of my life where the work that I did with Otis for workforce development was very, I was very passionate about. And now I'm working for the trade industry and hopefully having a bigger impact across the nation. So it's exciting.

Sarah - 00:02:34:

Wonderful. John?

John - 00:02:36:

Hello. As my LinkedIn profile says, I'm a father first. I have four little ones at home. My daughter just got called up to varsity for soccer.

Sarah - 00:02:43:

I was going to say not so little anymore.

John - 00:02:45:

Well, yeah, 60 years old, all the way down to eight. So father first, that's really important to me. But beyond that, I'm just really passionate about finding the next story that can help another service leader. And one of my big passion projects outside of all the corporate profit opportunities that service represents and everything else is this notion that service can be a function of humanity. And doing good for the world and improving the humanity that's in the world. So that's a big passion project for me. So thank you for the invitation to be a judge and for coming here this week. Kudos, IFS. It's been a great event.

Sarah - 00:03:16:

Thanks for being here. So we talked a bit as we announced the standout 50 about why it's so important to do so. This isn't just about, Future of Field Service or the IFS brand or the service counselor or any individual. It's really about acknowledging the hard work these individuals are doing, the teams that are behind them, but also what service represents. So we did speak about that a bit on stage, and then we've had some impromptu and more formal roundtable discussions since where we've, you know, expanded on some of those points that I want to sort of come back to in this podcast discussion, starting with just getting both of your thoughts to sort of set the stage on why it's so important to recognize service leaders. So let's start there.

John - 00:04:02:

All right. So I think service has long been considered a necessary evil in many organizations, right? You go back several decades, especially in manufacturing-centric industries, it's been an afterthought. And I think we've saw this community kind of evolve its mindset from this cost center orientation to the profit center orientation, and the whole opportunity to derive profits from field service and service, more broadly speaking, has been a common theme in fred. And I think that the impact that service is having on an organization's overall health is well document that, right? You look at some of the major brands that we care and know and love, BMW on new car ships, 10 to 12% profit margin. On aftermarket parts, somewhere in the 60 to 65%. You look at companies like Kawasaki, right? They sometimes operate at a razor-thin product margin, but their health and wellness of their company is derived from the aftermarket full sales support. And so I think the criticality of service to the corporate agenda should be common and ubiquitous, but there's some cultural barriers in terms of achieving that. So I think it's great to be able to recognize some of those standout leaders that have achieved that corporate shift in culture. And for that, it's special to me to do that type of thing.

Dot - 00:05:16:

Yeah. I think the cool thing about service revenue is it helps smooth out the cyclical nature of the peaks and valleys, right? So it can really kind of provide a steady income stream through good times and bad, right? Because you still need to keep everything running, so it provides a study income stream and then depending on your service contracts and how you structure them, it's also aftermarket opportunity, break-fix opportunity, right? So you can boost your revenue stream that way. So I just feel like that Wall Street kind of tends to look at top-line growth. And sometimes on the service side of the business, we might be too focused on that regular revenue stream. And what we have to be looking at is how do we leverage service to grow that top-line growth, right? And I'll never forget it. We had an intern working for us, an MBA student, who said that sales was the sexy side of the business. And I was like... Well, I kind of feel that way about service. Like this is like we have the relationships with the customers. We can leverage those relationships. They trust us. We build trust. And a lot of sales can be driven from trust if you're delivering on the service that you need to deliver to the customer.

Sarah - 00:06:31:

Right.

John - 00:06:32:

Well, in one of our State of 50 recipients is Ged Cranny from- It's the most appropriate time for me to drop this direct. Well, in one of our State of 50 recipients is Ged Cranny from Konica Minolta who said, "Sales is from the wallet or the pocket and service is from the art". And I thought that was really a really great comment. Great one.

Sarah - 00:06:51:

Absolutely. I said this on stage, but service excellence. Is often when service is done seamlessly, invisibly, even... Predictively, right? So not even getting to the point where you have a failure that you need to go and fix, right? And I think that contributes to it being sometimes intangible, invisible to organizations. Just to kind of build upon what you both said, part of the purpose of this initiative is not only to recognize the leadership of these individuals and the team work of those behind them are doing, but also to elevate the prominence of service with leadership across the business and to help them understand that it is not only critically important, but it can be a powerful engine for innovation and growth. Right? So that being said, if we think about the leaders themselves, what are your thoughts on in today's landscape? What characteristics make a service leader stand out?

John - 00:08:02:

Well, I think we kind of talked about this in the opening commentary, why we're recognizing standout 50, which is their ability to culturally ship the organization in the direction of service to recognize. I think that's one big part of it, right? The recognition and then the cascading of that culture across the organization, that's a big critical part. The other is this notion that we're in this world of automation and technology and digital transformations dominated the agenda from the last five plus years now, right? And so you're seeing this battle between a human led approach versus a digital first approach. And I think those service leaders that are doing a really, really fantastic job are finding the parallels between those. That it's not one or the other, it's both, right? That you can find the intersection point and have those two things work in harmony rather than against each other. So that was one, that was another criteria. And then the other is that they just embrace a bottom up approach, that they listen. They involve their frontline in the innovation and the transformation, all the goodness that's happening at the organization. They're doing ride-alongs, they're doing listening posts and councils and things to gather feedback from the frontline to the leadership so that they can make changes that can impact the organization moving forward. That's some of the things that stand out to me.

Dot - 00:09:13:

And I think that the value of that technician and the relationship with the customer, the trust value with the customer and that engagement, that respect and how you treat them is just so critical because, and I think also if you're a leader who values your technicians and they know you're listening and they know you're acting upon their recommendations and weeding them into how you're attacking to upper management and how you're guiding the organization down paths, that just pays dividends, right? And so now when you have to try something, you want to try a new product or you want to pilot an idea. You can say like, hey, I'm looking for like five people to try this new process or this new technology or this new app that I found. Who's willing to try it for me? You're going to have hands raised if you're that kind of standout leader. People are going to want to help you figure things out. And the fact that you're coming to them and saying who wants to help is huge.

Sarah - 00:10:20:

Yeah.

Dot - 00:10:20:

Right. And so it just and that just success builds upon success. Right. Once you have that vibe going and the energy going in the right direction, there's just no stopping you as a team.

Sarah - 00:10:31:

Yeah. I would just add, I think these leaders have to be masters in prioritization. Between putting time, effort, energy into their teams because those teams are serving the customers, knowing what matters to the customers and what that means to the business. But also, as we talked about, evangelizing the role of service within the business, figuring out when and where to innovate, how to meet the demands of today's business, while also thinking ahead. There's all of these different things. And then continuous learning. I think these leaders are very willing to self-reflect and not become not only complacent, but just beholden to anyone's style or approach, right? They're constantly willing to listen and learn and evolve. And, you know, that benefits them, but it also benefits their teams and their companies and their customers. So you both come at this from a bit of a different angle. So Dot... You spent 30 plus years leading service yourself. And I'm just wondering if you can share a time that you felt. Well-recognized or acknowledged for your leadership and that impact it had on you.

Dot - 00:11:51:

When I first became a branch manager, so I'm going way back. So I had been a supervisor and I've gone to school at night, got my MBA, became a manager. And I can remember going to my first regional review with the regional manager and him saying, thank you for your leadership. The results are outstanding. And I'm like, the results are the team's results. Right. And he was like, no. The results are your results. And I was like, no, the results are the team's results. But it takes a leader who's willing to enable and empower the team to get those results. So I still don't feel like I wanted that recognition. And I don't know that I ever will. I just wanted it to be known that team that was part of my group. Had that capability all along.

Sarah - 00:12:44:

Yeah.

Dot - 00:12:44:

Right? And then what happens is they get a ton of confidence. And where something used to be a roadblock, they're like, oh, no, we can work around that. We can come over it, under it. I'm like, it's just a roadblock. There's other ways to do this. Let's figure it out. And it was just amazing to see the confidence grow. And I think more than life changing for me, it was life changing for them because they all realized how much more they were capable of doing.

Sarah - 00:13:17:

Now, you mentioned that you feel, you know, when that person said sales is the sexy side of the business and you said, no, services. A lot of times, though, there is this conversation about the fact that the salespeople are constantly acknowledged and rewarded and amplified throughout the organization. And that's not always true in service. So. That's one of the reasons we did this initiative. And while I'm absolutely honored to acknowledge these 50 leaders right now, I'm also wondering, God, if you can think about from your perspective through levels of the service organization. What could companies consider about how to ensure that their... Paying attention to who's standing out in their organization. Acknowledging that hard work?

Dot - 00:14:06:

So I think there's, depending on the size of the organization, there's leadership development programs, right, where you get tapped on the shoulder, you're given opportunities. Maybe you have roundtable discussions and you invite service leaders, like people who are doing a nice job with their teams, have the CO have a roundtable, invite those people to that opportunity. But the other thing is just to even get that acknowledgement of a job well done. One thing that always like stood out to me is in the height of COVID, right at the very beginning, we had some people who just went above and beyond, like amazingly above and beyond. And we didn't know how to acknowledge that. And I talked to the president of the company and said, could you write a thank you now? Could you write a thank you letter just to thank them for what they've done? And he's like, well, I'll write it if you co-sign it with me, right? Because we did it together. And, so we did. So we wrote a thank you letter to those key people who had just gone above and beyond where normally we would have given a gift card or an extra high award or some other award. It was a letter, that had the most impact. And you know what they did with that? They put it on the refrigerator for their kids to sing. And they said, look at what I got today.

Sarah - 00:15:19:

Yeah.

Dot - 00:15:20:

It was huge. It was so meaningful. And it didn't cost us anything.

Sarah - 00:15:24:

Yes. And it's such a good reminder of the impact. Those things have. It doesn't have to be costly. It doesn't have to be some extravagant thing. That reminded me, I was just having a conversation a week or two ago with a leader. A senior leader in an organization. And he gave the example of because of his level, he gets a lot of like company swag, or he'll get tickets to a game or this or that. And he said, I'm going to point like... I have plenty of t-shirts and hats and this and that. So what I do every time is pick someone on my team that I want to acknowledge something they've done. I write them a note. I send them the tickets or the whatever it is and let them know like, I wanted to share this with you because I appreciate X, Y, and Z. And I thought like, that's a really nice thing to do rather than just letting it pile up somewhere, like share it with someone who isn't getting those things. And again, it's not costing anything. It's just taking five minutes to do it and has a big impact.

John - 00:16:25:

I love these examples. One of the things that I hear commonly from service leaders is the element of surprise that they witness when they just out of the blue call one of their service team members. Right. So just calling them up and saying, hi, and how's your day? And plugging in and having a willingness to listen and get involved. So there's just an element of being open and accessible that I think can be really a part of recognition. And then we've seen some other cool things with recognition programs like CurLED programs, Schneider Electric being a great example. They have this service superhero award where every month they do a $3,000 spot bonus nominated by a peer. I think there's the compensation reward and then there's just the element of openness and being considerate of listening and being involved.

Sarah - 00:17:09:

I was thinking, too, I mean, not to name names because I know plenty of amazing leaders, but I was thinking about Gyner Ozgul, who at the time was with Smart Care and he was the president. And we had some really open, honest discussions during the pandemic about how hard it was. For them as a business, for their technicians, for him as a leader. And one of the things he was doing during that time is he would pick a different technician. I don't know if it was every night or whatever, and FaceTime them and just spend five or 10 minutes saying, how are you? Are you okay? How's your family? Because his thinking was, if I can do nothing else right now, I can let them know I care. And I mean, those personal things are really what matters the most. So, John, in the work you do at the Service Council. You interact as well with a lot of amazing service leaders. You've seen a lot of shifts in the industry and all of that. What have you noticed over the last few years in terms of characteristics, approach? What stands out to you?

John - 00:18:11:

According to our research, service leaders' mindset has shifted year over year in a pathway that might make a lot of sense as you think about the things that we were encountering in markets, right? So around the pandemic timeframe, it was very business continuity oriented, very cost oriented. That was the theme of 2020, 2019, 2020. And then as we emerged from that, the immediate turn was sports revenue, right? So they started to think, okay, how can we monetize predictive and proactive capabilities? How can we move down this outcome-based methodology and become servitized and servitization? So there was this whole focus on monetization of services and revenue generation. And that makes a lot of sense. But behind that, we saw them retreat a little bit and get this customer preservation mindset. So they wanted to preserve the customer relationship that was legacy, that wasn't monetized. So predictive and proactive, easily attainable from an operational execution standpoint. In terms of monetization, a little bit trickier. So they retreated to their legacy customers and had this preservation mindset. And that was last year. And this year, we've seen them turn to both a customer mindset, but also an innovation mindset. So there's a combination of growth around innovating with the customer. And so things like hyper-personalization, things like monetization. So it's just interesting to see as we see the mindset shift year over year. You see what happens next year.

Sarah - 00:19:36:

Yeah.

John - 00:19:36:

About to launch the service.

Sarah - 00:19:37:

Okay. We'll stay tuned. So when we were accepting nominations for the standout 50, we asked that the people nominating speak to how the leaders they were nominating stand out in their innovative approaches, their authenticity, and their execution of service strategies. So those were sort of the three categories we were looking for input around. I want to ask you both, and Dot, we're going to start with you this time. In your opinion, which of those three is most important and why?

Dot - 00:20:09:

I think authenticity, because you want to work for an authentic leader. You want to work with somebody who has steady and strong morals, who isn't a different person in front of senior leadership than they are with you, and who treats everybody equally with respect from senior leadership to the service technician. Doesn't matter where you are in the organization, you're equally respected. And somebody who's an authentic leader, who's true to themselves and true to their people, I think is the most valuable leader that you can have. And one thing that I think an authentic leader does is admit when they don't know something and not have any issues with that whatsoever. So there's that humility factor, just like, I'm not afraid to say I don't know that answer. And hopefully you have a strong enough team that you built that somebody on your team knows the answer or you know where to go to get that.

Sarah - 00:21:01:

Or you can figure it out together.

Dot - 00:21:02:

You can figure it out together. But it just, I want to work for an authentic person. I don't want to work for somebody who's not going to be honest with me and tell me exactly where I stand. So I think that it's a huge benefit to have that. And I think all of the nominees, when you read across their nominations, all came across as truly authentic leaders, which was, it was fun to read the nominations just for that.

John - 00:21:27:

Yeah. I wasn't going to say all that just to surprise you. Because it's so important. It was a close second, but I would lean on innovation. And I think one of the things, it speaks to both the mindset shift of the service leader, as I just outlined, but it also speaks to something that I've been looking at, which is with all this automation, institution of guided workflows, how can we script service delivery and automate it and subordinate human-led tasks versus digital-led tasks? Are we taking the fun out of service, right? It's like, because like one of the things we talk about with our voice of the field service engineer survey every year, we get several thousand responses from technicians and we ask them, what do you like about the job? And what do you dislike about the job? They don't like paperwork and admin. They don't like time spent finding information. Time spent finding information, superseded paperwork and admin for the first time this year. But on the things they like, they want to collaborate with their team. They want to solve problems and fix things. That's inherent to their nature. So with all this automation and scripting and guided and digital automation and everything that's happening, are we losing that innovation for it? And so innovation would be my answer.

Sarah - 00:22:32:

Yeah, very good. I would agree with that. If you were asking me my opinion, but only because I think it's, I think authenticity supersedes a leader's ability to execute or a leader's ability to motivate innovation. So I think they're all important. But if I were picking, that's why I would pick that one. I think also you mentioned honesty. And I just think about like the inefficiency in not being open and transparent is just astounding. So. All right. Any closing thoughts from either of you on the initiative, leadership characteristics, any of the side conversations we've had today, like anything else that you would note about?

Dot - 00:23:13:

I think that for the people that we spoke about today, that we've honored today with this award, they're incredibly willing to share not only with their team, but with each other, with other industries. And this event is something that really opened your eyes to what's possible from other industries. And then you can take those ideas and you can then say like, oh, I can, I can steal that idea or borrow that idea from that company. And with a little tweaking, I can make it work for me. And so I just feel like the. Level of openness with the candidates that we awarded the prize to today. Amazing how willing they are to share their successes and then listen to the other person's concerns and maybe start brainstorming possible solutions. So it's just been, it's been fun. I mean, I've loved it. Thank you so much for inviting me to do this.

Sarah - 00:24:09:

I think that's a good point. And it made me think of something you both said, which is. Dot, when you defended that position and said, no, service is sexy. And then, John, you mentioned the people centricity, the human centricity, service being the heart. There is something incredibly special about service and the community that surrounds it. And that willingness to share knowledge and help lift one another up. And it is really special. I mean, it's why I've been doing what I've been doing for, a long time. And John, probably similar for you. And I think that's why you led service for so long and said, no, like this is the best part of the business. So I think part of this going back to like the prominence and the recognition, not of individuals, but of the importance of it comes back to figuring out how do we articulate and how do we illustrate what's so special about it to the rest of the business to make sure that we're not underplaying its importance and its potential. Yeah. So any closing thoughts from you, John?

John - 00:25:19:

I love what you guys have done here this week is amazing. Kudos to the whole IFS team on the overall event, but the standout 50 is just so important, right? To recognize service for all its importance and goodness. I love it. And the reason why I love it is because I think that service actually has an existential threat, to be honest. I actually argued that. And my opening thoughts at another event, our own earlier in September, and that is with all this automation, with all the focus on profit, with the challenges with respect to labor shortages and capacity planning issues that service leaders are facing, are we losing progress in terms of the service leader finding its way to the board? Because what I'm seeing is more prominently chief customer officer, very prominent amongst the corporate agenda, right? And when you look at the Fortune 100 companies, only 7% have a V-level plus service leader, did that research prior to my keynote, that means that there's a lot of progress still needed to be made. And so, I do think we're making progress, I argued all the reason why we should be making progress and we all agree, but I think that, there's a challenge I do and so, it excites me because it allows us to continue to do this work.

Sarah - 00:26:27:

Yeah. And I was going to say, I mean, let's all continue doing the work we're doing because we all love the community. We love what it represents. And so there's the idea of small actions with great love have a major impact. Right. So we each keep doing our part. Respect and appreciate you both so much. I want to give another massive congratulations to each of the standout 50 and their amazing teams behind that. Again, I'm thrilled to have the opportunity to honor those people, but also to collaborate with Dot, John and Tim and to each do our part in elevating the awareness of such an important function. So thank you both for being here.

Dot - 00:27:06:

Thank you, Sarah.